Prologue
The Wrong Genre
There were three things Han Seo-in believed every good romance needed.
A memorable beginning.
A convincing reason for two people to fall in love.
And a kiss that made the audience forget about the ridiculous price of their movie tickets.
Her own love life had failed all three.
The beginning had been forgettable. The reason was questionable. And the kissing—
Well.
That wasn’t something she particularly wanted to discuss at nine in the morning.
Especially not while standing in front of her bathroom mirror with toothpaste on her chin.
Seo-in leaned closer to inspect a stubborn strand of hair sticking out above her left ear.
Twenty-eight years old. Employed. Reasonably attractive. No criminal record. Two functioning kidneys.
On paper, she was doing fine.
Her reflection disagreed.
“Don’t look at me like that.”
The reflection continued looking at her like that.
Six days ago, she’d broken up with her boyfriend of two years.
There had been no cheating. No terrible betrayal. Nobody had thrown a drink in anyone’s face.
They had simply sat across from each other in a café and discovered, rather inconveniently, that neither of them could confidently answer a very important question.
Do you love me?
For a moment, Seo-in imagined how that scene should have gone.
A café overlooking the Han River.
Rain beating against the windows.
A beautiful woman sitting across from a handsome man, struggling to hold back tears.
“Was any of it real?” she whispered.
The man lowered his head.
“Seo-in...”
“ANSWER ME!”
A violin screamed.
Someone dropped a wineglass.
Outside, lightning split the sky.
The camera moved closer to her trembling lips—
BEEP. BEEP. BEEP.
Seo-in slapped her phone.
The bathroom returned.
No violins. No lightning.
Just a woman with toothpaste on her chin who was now seven minutes late for work.
“Terrible production value,” she muttered.
She rinsed her mouth.
The annoying part wasn’t that her relationship had ended.
Well, of course that was annoying.
Two years was a considerable amount of time to spend learning another person’s habits, only to discover that all the information was suddenly useless.
She knew how Park Joon-young liked his coffee.
She knew he hated cucumber but would eat pickles.
She knew he always checked his pockets twice before leaving a restaurant, yet somehow still managed to forget something.
She knew he slept on his right side.
And she knew that, in approximately forty minutes, she would see him sitting two desks away from hers.
Because apparently, whoever was writing her life had never heard of a proper ending.
Most romantic dramas allowed their heroines to disappear somewhere after a breakup.
Paris, perhaps.
A quiet seaside town.
A beautiful countryside house inherited from a mysterious grandmother.
Seo-in got the office.
With fluorescent lighting.
And a printer that jammed whenever anyone was in a hurry.
She pulled a cardigan from her wardrobe and checked the time.
Eight minutes late.
Excellent.
At least her morning was developing a plot.
Seo-in had spent the last five years working as an editor.
Her job was to find problems in other people’s stories.
Weak character motivations. Unconvincing dialogue. Plot holes large enough to swallow an entire supporting cast.
She was good at it.
Give her three hundred pages of an unfinished manuscript, and she could usually tell you exactly where the story had gone wrong.
Give her three minutes to explain her own romantic decisions, however, and she became considerably less impressive.
Perhaps that was why she liked stories so much.
In fiction, everything could be revised.
A terrible conversation could be rewritten.
A disappointing ending could be changed.
An irritating character could be sent abroad, preferably somewhere without internet access.
Real life offered none of these conveniences.
Once you said something stupid, it remained said.
Once you missed your chance, nobody shouted Cut! and allowed you another take.
And once you broke up with someone who worked in the same department, you still had to attend the Monday morning meeting together.
Seo-in found this deeply unreasonable.
By the time she reached the bus stop, she had already imagined three possible versions of her day.
In the first, she would arrive at work looking so beautiful and successful that Joon-young would immediately regret losing her.
In the second, she would announce her resignation, throw her employee ID onto the conference table, and walk away while everyone applauded.
In the third, a mysterious billionaire would approach her on the street and offer her a job that paid ten times her current salary.
She liked the third one best.
Unfortunately, the only man who approached her was an elderly gentleman asking whether the bus had already passed.
“No, sir. Not yet.”
“Good, good.”
He stood beside her.
Seo-in sighed.
Apparently, the billionaire was running late.
Her bus arrived four minutes later.
She squeezed herself between a university student and a woman carrying an enormous shopping bag.
Someone stepped on her shoe.
Someone else coughed directly behind her head.
A baby began crying.
Seo-in stared through the window at the morning traffic.
Perhaps she had been too ambitious.
She didn’t need a billionaire.
Or a dramatic resignation.
Or even a beautiful, rain-soaked reconciliation.
At this point, she would settle for something interesting happening before lunch.
Anything.
A mysterious letter.
An unexpected phone call.
A secret admirer.
An alien invasion.
Actually, no. Not an alien invasion. She had a deadline on Friday.
She rested her forehead against the cool glass.
“Come on,” she whispered.
“Give me something.”
The bus lurched forward.
Her forehead knocked against the window.
“Ow!”
The university student glanced at her.
Seo-in straightened and pretended nothing had happened.
Fine.
Perhaps she should stop asking the universe for favors.
After all, in the movies, the moment a character wished for something exciting to happen, things usually went terribly wrong.
A stranger appeared.
A secret was revealed.
Someone opened a door they really shouldn’t have opened.
And suddenly, the entire story changed.
Seo-in knew that.
She had edited enough stories to recognize the warning signs.
What she didn’t know was that, before the day ended, she would meet a man who looked like he belonged in a completely different genre.
A man who would mistake her suspicion for an insult.
A man who had very little patience for dramatic nonsense.
And a man whose favorite answer appeared to be a single word.
No.
But that would come later.
For now, Han Seo-in was simply a tired editor on a crowded bus, wondering whether she had enough money left on her transit card to get home.
Her phone vibrated.
A message from her junior editor.
Kim Ara: Unnie, are you coming?
Seo-in typed back.
Seo-in: Unfortunately.
She slipped the phone into her bag and watched the city pass outside.
Another ordinary morning.
Another ordinary day.
At least, that was what she thought.
And somewhere, completely unaware that he was about to enter her story, Cha I-jun was probably saying no to someone.
